Oslo, August 31st (2011)

Joachim Trier's second feature follows Anders, a recovering addict given one day's leave from a Norwegian rehab clinic. He drifts through Oslo, visits old friends, sabotages a job interview, and quietly dismantles what remains of his life. The film is a character study in the key of quiet devastation, loosely adapted from Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's novel and clearly indebted to Louis Malle. It observes. It does not announce.

The film's social awareness is of an older, European variety: melancholy, humane, and entirely disinterested in the categories that dominate contemporary Anglo-American cinema. Anders is a white Norwegian in a white Norwegian city. His addiction and his suicidal despair are rendered as private catastrophe, not as a platform. A sister's girlfriend appears, shares a scene, and departs without the film pausing to congratulate itself. A party conversation about ageing and the uneven romantic prospects of men and women is allowed to sit there, unresolved, a piece of observed life instead of a thesis.

None of this is a criticism. Trier has made something rare: a film about a man who cannot be saved, presented without sermon or solution. The camera watches. Anders walks. The pool closes for the season. There is no lesson appended, no systemic explanation offered for his pain, no invitation to feel virtuous for having watched. We get a portrait instead, and portraits do not score points. They simply hang there, and this one hangs beautifully. The classification is straightforward. On every axis of modern cultural signaling, the film is a blank. It is 2011, it is Norway, and it has other things on its mind.